Donations of baby formula to Haiti strike controversy

You might think a baby who survived the Haiti earthquake would benefit from just about anything: jars of food, a fresh pair of clothes, bottled water, baby formula…not so fast…actually many people are vehemently objecting to donations of artificial milk.

Ricardo Arduengo/AP

A nurse feeds a quake-injured baby at the Israeli Field Hospital in Port-au-Prince.

The contentious breast-feeding versus bottle-feeding debate that so many new moms are faced with in America is making its way into the aftermath of the Haitian disaster.

While many organizations are requesting formula for Haitian babies, others are speaking out against these relief efforts. Why!?!? In the midst of this crisis, it’s hard to imagine that anyone would oppose any food source for hungry babies.

Donating formula might appear to be a great way to help out on the surface, but in a thoughtful article on Salon.com, Tracy Clark-Flory explores why it might do more harm than good.

Formula has to be mixed with water, Clark-Flory explains, and clean water, or a place to boil water, isn’t easy to come by in Haiti. Nor are there places to sterilize bottles or safely store formula.

UNICEF has found that formula-feeding can bring about infection, diarrhea, dehydration, malnutrition and death. “In fact, following the earthquake this fall in Indonesia, the organization had to issue a call to halt donations of formula” Clark-Flory writes. “Three years earlier, after another earthquake in the region, UNICEF found that infants younger than six-months who were fed donated formula were twice as likely to have diarrhea than those who did not receive formula; the rate among babies between six and 23 months of age was five times the pre-earthquake rate.”

What’s more, if a mother uses formula and thus reduces or stops breastfeeding, it creates a problem when the donated formula runs out, according to the blog Good Intentions Are Not Enough. The mother will have problems adequately breastfeeding her child because she has decreased or even ended her own milk production. Thus a simple goodwill donation can actually lead to a dependency on the item that is donated.

While there might be downsides to a mother feeding her baby formula, there is certainly no other option for an orphaned baby who has lost her mother. But the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention both recommend using ready-to-feed formula, which doesn’t need to be mixed with water.

As for the small amounts of formula that are needed, Meredith Connelly, a spokesperson for the Red Cross, told Salon.com, it is much “faster for organizations to collect funds and distribute what is needed to the people on the ground,” and that way they can “give what is really needed.”

The debate over whether it’s appropriate to send formula to Haiti has unfolded over Twitter. Nonprofits are sending out tweets asking for formula, which are then met by messages from a rival campaign with the Twitter identity “Don’t Send Formula,” Salon.com reports.

One Tweet reads: “please send formula to Haiti and don’t listen to that stupid doula who says formula is bad. Dumb biotch!”